Flawed Characters In the Public Eye, Past and Present

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Paul Attanasio was born in 1959, the same year the quiz show scandal on television stunned and outraged the nation. But Mr. Attanasio, who wrote the script for the film "Quiz Show," speaks of the scandal as if it happened hours ago.

"Films only work if they're about us today," said Mr. Attanasio, a Harvard-trained lawyer and former film critic for The Washington Post. "And I thought where we all are today is the product of this national loss of innocence, which began with the quiz show scandals and continued on to Vietnam, Watergate, Oliver North, even O. J. Simpson."

Directed by Robert Redford, the film opens Wednesday with powerful advance reviews but uncertain commercial prospects. "There's no violence, no sex, no love story, no car chases," said Mr. Attanasio, who has rapidly emerged as one of the more formidable screenwriters in Hollywood. "The characters in it are flawed, and all the stuff in it is really subtle. And subtlety has gone out of the culture." A Real-Life Plot

The movie deals with three men whose lives were irrevocably changed by the scandal surrounding one of the most popular shows on television in the late 1950's, "Twenty-One."

The scandal broke when a former contestant accused the show's most popular guest, Charles Van Doren, of knowing the answers to questions beforehand and participating in a fraud. Mr. Van Doren, a Columbia University English instructor and a member of one of the nation's most renowned literary families, had emerged before the scandal as a charming American folk hero whose picture had appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek. He admitted his complicity in the rigged show and now lives a reclusive life as a writer in Connecticut.

The show's three main actors are Ralph Fiennes, who played the psychotic Nazi commandant in "Schindler's List," as Mr. Van Doren; John Turturro as Herb Stempel, the disenchanted quiz show contestant who blew the whistle on Mr. Van Doren, NBC (the network) and Geritol (the sponsor), and Rob Morrow as Richard N. Goodwin, then a young Washington lawyer, who initiated a Congressional investigation. It was a chapter in Mr. Goodwin's 1988 book, "Remembering America: A Voice From the 60's," that served as the basis for the film. From Anger and Experience

Seated in a restaurant near Beverly Hills, Mr. Attanasio seemed a bit more self-possessed, confident and candid than most successful writers. "I've had a charmed life," he admitted. "I'm in a very privileged position."

His next film, "Disclosure," based on the Michael Crichton best seller about sexual harassment, has been completed with a cast that includes Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. The film was directed by Barry Levinson, whose company was one of the producers of "Quiz Show." Mr. Levinson and Mr. Redford are two of Mr. Attanasio's mentors.

"We were in sync right from the beginning," Mr. Redford said over the phone. "First of all, he's got a very keen mind. And like most writers, there's a lot of anger down there. And he handles that with humor and a sense of irony and a kind of savage incisiveness. He has a natural sense of dramatic rhythm. And he doesn't overwrite; he edits as he goes. That's from his experience as a journalist."

Mr. Attanasio grew up in the Bronx, in Pelham Bay, and his family later moved to Teaneck, N.J. (His father, Joseph, a businessman, had speaking parts in "Quiz Show" and "Disclosure.")

After graduating from Harvard in 1981, and then Harvard Law School in 1984, he was hired at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. At the time a senior partner met the law school graduates and told them how to succeed.

"He said he'd rather be sitting in a vault in Omaha doing a document discovery in the middle of the summer than playing golf or spending time with his family," Mr. Attanasio said. "He was very sincere about it. And I felt I should find something I love to do, too. And this was not it." Writing Reviews, Then Screenplays

Mr. Attanasio sought an internship on The Washington Post. Coincidentally, he said, the newspaper was struggling to hire a film critic. "Everyone turned it down because they didn't want to move to Washington," he said. "They were desperate."

Because Mr. Attanasio had written film reviews and criticisms for The Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and other publications, the newspaper gave him a trial run as a critic and then hired him. He worked as a critic from 1984 to early 1987, when he left to move to New York to try writing screenplays.

He recalls his years as a film critic with a certain distaste, for the job as well as his attitude toward it. "I was like the snotty boy critic," he said. "It was the time of the teen-age comedies, and just seeing one after another was wearing me out. I remember my last review was for 'Over the Top,' a Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling movie. I had already used my Sylvester Stallone insult jokes in my 'Rambo' review. I had nothing new to say. It was probably the shortest review of all time. Two paragraphs."

Mr. Attanasio's film career was charmed. His first screenplay was about the Mafia. "It was a terrible screenplay, but it had very good dialogue," he said. "On the basis of that I got an agent and an assignment to do a screenplay at Paramount about the C.I.A. After that I was off to the races."

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That screenplay went unproduced, but a third one, "Donnie Brasco," about a real-life agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had infiltrated the Mafia, caught Mr. Levinson's attention. With Mr. Levinson, Mr. Attanasio created an acclaimed NBC television series, "Homicide: Life on the Streets." Mr. Attanasio, who moved to Los Angeles in 1987, lives in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Katie Jacobs, a producer, and their daughter, Annie, 15 months old. The Role of Ethnic Tensions

For "Quiz Show," Mr. Attanasio watched television clips of "Twenty-One," read newspaper and magazine accounts, and spent time talking to Mr. Goodwin, who is one of the film's numerous producers. The film itself followed a tortuous path in Hollywood, with every studio in town except Walt Disney rejecting it as too commercially risky.

"You just have to see the movies today to know why they turned this one down," he said. "They'd rather make 'Speed.' "

Surprisingly, Mr. Attanasio said that the movie, which went through more than a dozen drafts in three years, has a deeply personal resonance. "The quiz show story is just the background to the landscape," he said. "It's really about the loss of innocence of these three men."

Mr. Attanasio said he was especially immersed in the story's ethnic undercurrents. As a writer with Italian roots, Mr. Attanasio said, he recalled the constant outrage among his parents and relatives at the depiction of Italians on television in the 1960's, when he was growing up. "They were always depicted as gangsters or loudmouths, sort of obnoxious suntanned guys with gold chains," he said.

In the film, Mr. Attanasio said, he used that sense of ethic tension to depict the relationship between Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Stempel, who are both Jewish. But Mr. Goodwin was a Harvard lawyer who sought to move into the white-shoe worlds of Wall Street and Washington, while Mr. Stempel, who lived in Astoria, Queens, had no such aspirations and lived at the other end of the class and cultural divide.

"I grew up with Italians and Jews," he said. "There was a very similar dynamic within groups. The Bronx Italians looked down on the Brooklyn Italians. There was always this internecine jockeying."

Mr. Attanasio also views the film as nothing less than an allegory about the movie business, a world about which he's quite ambivalent.

"A lot of the sensibility of the movie in terms of what we're saying about show business comes from my experience and certainly Redford's," he said. "What's interesting about living here is that it's so different from the East. In the East you find people with cynical attitudes who are, deep down, naive, innocent, not cynical at all. Sort of like Humphrey Bogart in 'Casablanca.' It sort of astonishes me that I came out with that attitude."

"But out here you find people who are, on the surface, impeccably nice and adopt this kind of faux naive attitude," he said. "They seem like perpetual adolescents who play their video games and wear baseball caps and talk about their families. But they're killers. Incredibly cynical. That was a real shock to me. And that sensibility informs the movie."

Mr. Attanasio said his sometimes scathing film reviews had not entirely caught up with him -- although Mr. Stallone was actually interested in one of his scripts.

But then there was the case of Tom Hanks. "Hanks had some project, and he told a friend of mine, who was sitting on the beach with him, that he was looking for a writer," Mr. Attanasio recalled with a smile. "My friend said, 'You should hire Paul Attanasio.' "

"Hanks said the name was very familiar," said Mr. Attanasio. "My friend said that I did a lot of work for Barry Levinson and I used to be a critic."

"That's it!" shouted Mr. Hanks, the screenwriter said.

Mr. Attanasio said, "Hanks then proceeded to repeat my review, word for word, of 'Nothing in Common,' which I had completely forgotten."

But Mr. Hanks had obviously not forgotten the unkind 1986 review. Mr. Attanasio did not get the job.

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 1994, on Page C00011 of the National edition with the headline: Flawed Characters In the Public Eye, Past and Present. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe